Advanced Driver Assistance Systems – ADAS Solutions

Advanced Driver Assistance Systems will lead to rapidly increasing volumes of data within onboard-networks: Additional sensors with various techniques will be necessary for the detection of the entire car environment. They will deliver data throughout any drive, especially video and cameras will account for large amounts of data. The collected data needs to be merged to get a truly reliable “picture” of what is going on around the car. Both developments require a high performance computing capacity that the usual single ECU-solutions won’t be able to provide in the future.

Up until today, the car industry has in most cases followed the way of “discrete solutions” when deciding about onboard-network architectures. Demand is now changing towards platform or domain solutions for several reasons: The number of single ECUs in very high equipped premium cars already amounts to 70 and around 100 today. New functions coming from Advanced Driver Assistance Systems would raise this number even higher. But usable installation space within cars is limited, accompanied by questions of additional weight of the car. Complexity of the onboard network increases with every new “member” dramatically and single ECUs with one-core-CPUs are no conclusive answer to the computing capacity needs of data fusion, high data rate cameras and others any more.

TTTech Automotive has long-term expertise in developing and building complex and safety-relevant electronic control units. Deterministic Ethernet technology provides guarantee for their reliability and the exact meeting of all safety-relevant requirements. This also applies to RazorMotion and AthosMotion, high-performant platform solutions specifically focused on the needs of car manufacturers (OEMs) for upcoming Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS).

Deterministic Ethernet for Automotive Solutions

There is a huge potential for Ethernet to become the backbone network solution throughout the vehicle. This, in particular, includes safety-related and safety-critical applications to enable piloted and autonomous driving based on the capabilities of Deterministic Ethernet.

TTTech’s Deterministic Ethernet solution supports several standards including standard Ethernet (IEEE 802.3), Time-Triggered Ethernet (SAE AS6802) as well as AVB (Audio/Video Bridging) and the evolving TSN (Time Sensitive Networking). In particular the SAE AS6802 part of the solution has been developed to ensure correct clock-synchronization even in the presence of arbitrary single failures and to support standards such as DO 178, DO 254 and ISO 26262.

TTTech’s Deterministic Ethernet enables Guarantee of Service as well as meeting all safety-relevant requirements at the same time, making the design of a single central platform ECU for all driver assistance functions possible.

Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS)

ADAS means a number of functions in a car which can provide more comfort to the driver (e.g. parking pilot, high beam assistant, adaptive cruise control, automated driving with low speed in a traffic jam) or even provide more safety (e.g. blind spot monitor, lane keeping assistant, emergency braking assistant). Many of these functions are already available on the market. Advanced Driver Assistance Systems will in the long term lead to cars that can potentially drive autonomously.

According to the German VDA (Verband der Autoindustrie), the car industry is currently heading for level 3 in an ascending scale from level 0 to level 5. Level 3 means “highly automated driving” and includes that the driver needs no longer to continuously monitor the system, but must potentially be able to take over. The example given is lane departure and changing. The system handles lane holding and changing in a specific application case, detects system limits and asks the driver to take over with sufficient warning.

Level 5 would mean “driverless” but the timeline for the usage of such systems remains unclear.